Former National Institutes of Health director and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus will leave his post as president of New York City's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as soon as his successor is chosen.

Image: Public Library of Science

According to linkurl:__Science__,;http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/01/polymath-scient.html Varmus sent an email to his Sloan-Kettering colleagues this morning announcing his decision to step down. He wrote that he'd stay at the institution until a successor is found, and that he'd continue to run his lab, which focuses on the molecular mechanisms of oncogenesis. Varmus shared the 1989 linkurl:Nobel Prize;http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1989/varmus-autobio.html in Physiology or Medicine for the identification of oncogenes, headed up the NIH from 1993 to 1999, and co-founded the Public Library of Science, an open access publishing group. More recently, Varmus has been advising President Barack Obama as a co-chair of the linkurl:Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.;http://www.ostp.gov/cs/pcast He has been the president of Sloan-Kettering since 2000....